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Earlier this year, Kyle Clifford and his wife, Juli, were watching CBS News’s “Sunday Morning” when something flashed across their TV screen that made Juli turn to Kyle and say, “That looks like the thing you have in the basement.”
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The segment was about the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, and as the camera panned across a gallery wall, it briefly passed a stripy canvas. How stripy? Very stripy. It was nothing but stripes: thin vertical stripes in a rainbow of colors.
And it did look like the thing in the Cliffords’ Arlington, Va., basement, the thing Kyle thought of as a poster or a banner. It was a weird artifact he’d come across years ago in his junk-hauling business and had held on to for reasons he couldn’t really articulate.
After seeing the segment on TV, Kyle went to the basement, opened the Plexiglas case that entombed the stripy thing and saw something written on the back of the canvas: Totem. 1980. Gene Davis.
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The painting, by one of the leading artists of the Washington Color School, will be auctioned Friday at Quinn’s Auction Galleries in Falls Church. Lot 47 has an estimate of between $30,000 and $50,000.
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“This is how much I know about art: I would have hung it horizontally,” Kyle told me the other day as we stood in front of “Totem” at Quinn’s.
Like most of Davis’s work, the stripes are meant to be vertical. This painting is tall and skinny: 95 inches high and 16 inches wide.
“I was really glad it’s 95 inches, not 98,” said the auction house’s Matt Quinn. “It’ll fit in most homes. Most ceilings are 96 inches.”
So how did Kyle end up with it?
Five or six years ago, his company, Reliable Services, was hired to clear out the storage unit of a large D.C.-based trade association. The unit mainly contained dusty office furniture, which Kyle’s team duly loaded aboard his 16-foot box truck.
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Before taking castoffs to the dump, Kyle usually invites a charity to sift through the items, to see if there’s anything it can use.
“This was left over in the back of the truck,” Kyle said. “I took it home and jammed it into the basement.”
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Why?
“I honestly can’t tell you,” said Kyle, 56. “I guess because it was framed. I didn’t know what it was. I figured it was a trade show booth decoration. We throw away so many pop-up displays and trade-show banners and posters. You use them for one event and next year you do something else.”
TV shows such as “Storage Wars” and “American Pickers” have made it seem as if America’s basements, attics and rickety outbuildings are full of priceless artifacts. That’s not the case, said Kyle.
“Most of the stuff we find is destroyed couches that the pets got to and dead appliances,” he said. “A lot of people will buy a pickup truck and think they can become a treasure hunter.”
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But every now and then … Kyle said he once tried to convince a client that a World War II German army helmet probably had value, but the man just wanted it cleared away with the rest of his late father’s stuff. It fetched $1,500 at an antiques store.
And there was the time Kyle was moving a tall, heavy highboy. When he removed the drawers to make it lighter, an envelope that had been taped inside fell out. It contained $7,000 in cash. Kyle gave it to his client.
Said Kyle: “When we clear houses now, we immediately pull the drawers.”
Matt said he’s had similar episodes, typically in homes that were owned by people who grew up during the Great Depression.
“We used to call them stuffers,” Matt said. “I’d tell our guys, ‘You’ve got to be on stuffer alert. There could be anything anywhere.’ It doesn’t happen as much anymore.”
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Matt said that Washington Color School paintings are not unusual around here. Many of them once adorned office walls, as this one presumably did.
“I sold a Sam Gilliam out of a commercial building,” Matt said. He expects more works will turn up as the commercial real estate market contracts.
Kyle said some of the money he and Juli earn from the sale of “Totem” will go to one of their favorite charities: the Bichon Frise Club of America Charitable Trust.
“I have a great life doing this,” Kyle said. “I love what I do. It’s tiring and it’s exhausting. I’m 56 years old and I’m still lifting refrigerators and couches. Luckily, I don’t collect anything.”
correction
This column was changed to correct the spelling of Bichon Frise.
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